Kos Samaras
Kos Samaras is a director at RedBridge Group, a research and strategy firm specialising in public opinion, social trends, and behavioural insights. He works across industry, government, and media to help organisations understand community attitudes and navigate complex social and political environments.
Kos Samaras's articles (28 total)
Work longer, wait longer, now borrow your own retirement back
One Nation’s super-for-housing plan offers immediate relief, but risks repeating a message its new midlife voters know well: solve the problem with your own money.
The major parties collapsed. Why didn’t the Greens rise?
As Labor and Coalition support has collapsed, the Greens have remained stuck around 12 per cent – constrained by geography, culture and a changing generational base.
Gen X is still driving down to The River – and finding it dry
Many in Generation X have reached midlife carrying mortgages, insecure work, dependent children and ageing parents. The growing anger across middle Australia did not come from nowhere.
Mental health is not a niche issue. It is the electorate
Australians are experiencing extraordinary levels of psychological distress while mental health services remain underfunded and overstretched. The political cost will be measured not just in health outcomes, but in deepening distrust of government.
Victorian Labor's collapse isn't about debt. It's about 2020
Victorian Labor’s collapse is not only about debt, crime or infrastructure blowouts, but a delayed reckoning from communities that felt broken by lockdowns and ignored by the recovery.
Strangers in their own land: Victorian Labor forgot the suburbs that made it
Victorian Labor’s crisis is not just about leadership, but a decade of governing as though its western and north-western heartland would remain loyal while investment flowed elsewhere. Changing the leader may not be enough.
The half-empty hall: why Gen X broke Australian politics
One Nation’s rise is being driven by economically stranded Gen X voters in outer suburbs and regions, not the racial and culture-war constituency Pauline Hanson keeps trying to address.
Gen Z is not ageing into the old Australia
Why Australia’s Gen Z is unlike any voting cohort before it and why every institution built for the old Australia is about to find out.
Monetising grievance: in Australia it's harder than you think
Right-wing podcasting in Australia is akin to a craft beer with a niche following. It is not a mass market.
Hanson's politics of subtraction offers her own voters less
Pauline Hanson’s National Press Club speech exposed the weakness in the old right-wing politics of subtraction: in an age of scarcity, promising to take things away no longer lands on someone else, but on the voters she needs.
The man who did everything right
The story of a voter who did everything Australia once told working people to do: work hard, buy a home, raise a family and keep faith. Now, after years of lost jobs, debt and broken promises, his look towards One Nation is not loyalty but a warning.
Why Pauline Hanson's biggest weakness is her newest voters
One Nation's surge is easiest to read as anger. It is better read through a different lens – gathering the Australians who formed their sense of who they are in an offline world, where belonging was anchored where they grew up.
The quiet Australians who actually empty the bins
When the political class keeps choosing to squeeze outer-suburban, mortgage-stressed, salaried workers, we shouldn't be surprised to see these people turning to One Nation.
Three Australias: new polling shows deepening divide
Changing voting patterns are no longer a reaction to short-term events, they are a rebellion against inequality, says Kos Samaris.
Angus Taylor may have just created half a million new Labor voters
The Coalition’s plan to strip welfare access from non-citizens could accelerate a surge in citizenship and voter enrolment across migrant-heavy suburban seats critical to the Liberal Party’s electoral future.
The second-last budget reply – delivered by a Liberal MP
The Coalition’s plan to strip permanent residents of access to welfare payments risks detonating support across Australia’s outer-suburban migrant households, where families consisting of citizens and non-citizens live, work and vote together.
Farrer exposed a political divide the Liberals cannot bridge
The Farrer by-election revealed a deep political realignment, with One Nation consolidating support in regional Australia while multicultural and younger voters continue to move sharply against it.
A decade of dog-whistles and a decade of lost voters
The Coalition’s path back to government runs through roughly 25 seats. The overwhelming majority of them sit in greater Sydney and greater Melbourne where the combined Indian and Chinese population is already large and still growing fast. These diaspora hear the Coalition talk about out-of-control migration and vote accordingly.
The polls keep bouncing. The destination doesn’t change
One Nation is up. One Nation is down. What the weekly polling movements are actually telling us and what they are not.
Chasing ghosts, losing votes
New research shows immigration is not driving voter anger, yet the Coalition is targeting it anyway – risking further losses in the diverse, urban seats it must win back.
Voters no longer want managers – they want fighters
Across Western democracies, voters are abandoning consensus politics in favour of leaders willing to fight, name enemies and prosecute a cause – a shift now reshaping both left and right.
The fuel crisis won’t save the Coalition. It might finish them
Cost-of-living pressure will not automatically shift votes to the Coalition, as culturally aligned voters begin drifting toward alternatives that project conviction and stability.
The fuel crisis won’t save the Coalition. It might finish them
Cost-of-living pressure will not automatically shift votes to the Coalition, as culturally aligned voters begin drifting toward alternatives that project conviction and stability.
Best of 2025 - Burn it all down movements
When a 34-year-old democratic socialist defeats a political dynasty in the nation's largest city, we're witnessing more than another electoral upset.
Burn it all down movements
When a 34-year-old democratic socialist defeats a political dynasty in the nation's largest city, we're witnessing more than another electoral upset.
Why the Coalition can’t win without losing itself
The Coalition faces not a messaging challenge but a structural impossibility. Voters abandoning them won’t be satisfied by marginally tougher rhetoric.
The good, the bad and the stupid
When Sergio Leone made The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, he showed how flawed characters chasing the same prize could blunder their way into folly and missed opportunities.
From globalisation to AI: Why history is about to repeat itself
When globalisation loomed on the horizon in the late 20th century, governments around the world faced a choice: open the economy fully or manage the transition strategically.